[UPDATE, 10/30: Mr. Limbaugh closed his show today with what may be the final riff (four in all~~) on his suicide suggestion: “Uh, I, er, Mr. Revkin, for crying out loud. I’m making a point. I’m not advocating death. I do not advocate death on this program. I do not advocate control over anybody else’s life.”]

As I put it in the Wilson event: “Should you get credit — if we’re going to become carbon-centric — for having a one-child family when you could have had two or three. And obviously it’s just a thought experiment, but it raises some interesting questions about all this.”

The result, once the reverberating blogosphere ramped up the sound bites and eliminated the context, was Mr. Limbaugh’s challenge — or was it, in fact, a thought experiment?

This guy from The New York Times, if he really thinks that humanity is destroying the planet, humanity is destroying the climate, that human beings in their natural existence are going to cause the extinction of life on Earth — Andrew Revkin. Mr. Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself and help the planet by dying?

This might be funny, in a sad way, if it weren’t for the fact that my mailbox is already heaped with hate mail. And of course there’s the reality that explosive population growth in certain places, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, could be blunted without a single draconian measure, many experts say, simply by providing access to family planning for millions of women who already want it, but can’t get it — whether or not someone gets a carbon credit in the process.

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.